25 Things to Do When Your Working Genius Results Feel Wrong

Your Working Genius results arrive and something feels wrong.

The assessment says you are a Wonder but brainstorming sessions leave you drained. Or it names Tenacity as a competency when you know you abandon projects halfway through. Or the report claims Galvanising is your genius but standing in front of a group makes your chest tight. The disconnect is immediate and uncomfortable.

You are not alone in this reaction. Most leaders experience at least one moment of disagreement with their results, and that moment is not a failure of the framework. It is the framework doing exactly what it should.

Here are 25 things to do when you disagree with your Working Genius results, drawn from patterns I have seen across hundreds of team sessions and individual debriefs. If you are new to the model, the Working Genius implementation guide is a good place to start.

UNDERSTANDING THE DISCONNECT

The first step is not to resolve the disagreement. The first step is to understand what kind of disagreement you are having. Not all resistance to results comes from the same place. Some of it signals a misread. Some of it signals growth. Some of it signals a years-old wound you have been carrying without naming it.

1. Separate the work from the context where you do it

Your brain confuses the type of work with the conditions under which you have been forced to do it. You hate meetings, so you assume you cannot be a Galvaniser. You avoid ideation sessions, so Wonder feels wrong. You have been doing Enablement work for seven years in a toxic culture, so the idea that it could energise you seems absurd.

What you think you hate	What you might actually hate
Brainstorming	Unstructured brainstorming with no follow-through
Leading groups	Leading groups who are disengaged or hostile
Detail work	Detail work on projects you do not believe in
Implementation	Implementing someone else's half-formed idea alone

The work itself is neutral. The conditions under which you have been doing it are not. Strip the context away before you decide the assessment missed you.

Try this. Write down the last time you felt energised doing any version of the work your genius names. If you cannot remember one, the issue is not the assessment. The issue is that you have not done the work in healthy conditions for so long that you have forgotten what it feels like.

2. Acknowledge that self-perception lags behind reality

You are not always the best judge of what energises you. The brain is terrible at separating "things I am good at" from "things that give me energy" and even worse at separating "things I have been praised for" from "things I actually want to do."

You have spent years being rewarded for Enablement work, so your identity is now tied to it. The fact that it drains you does not change the fact that you are good at it. The assessment is not naming what you are good at. It is naming what fills your tank. Those are different measurements.

If your results name a genius you have never been praised for, your first instinct is to dismiss it. Resist that instinct. The thing you have never been praised for might be the thing you have never had permission to use.

What you think you are good at is often what you have been trained to do

What energises you is often what you do when no one is watching

What drains you is often what you have been doing for so long that you assume it is just part of the job

The assessment is holding up a mirror. If the reflection does not match the story you have been telling yourself for ten years, the mirror is not broken. The story might be.

3. Recognise the difference between skill and energy

Skill is what you can do. Energy is what refills you when you do it. Working Genius measures energy, not skill. This is the single most common source of disagreement with results.

You are exceptional at Enablement. You have built systems, supported teams, organised complex projects for fifteen years. The results say Enablement is a competency, not a genius. You read that as the assessment telling you that you are not good at it. That is not what it is saying.

What the assessment actually says is this. You can do Enablement work at a high level, but doing it does not refill your tank. You finish an Enablement-heavy week competent and exhausted. Someone with Enablement as a genius finishes the same week competent and energised.

If you are good at something but it drains you, you are operating in competency. If you avoid something even though you could do it, you are looking at frustration. If you do something and lose track of time, that is genius. The assessment is not evaluating your skill. It is evaluating where your energy comes from.

Callout: Being good at something does not mean it should be your primary role. It means you can do it when the team needs it without breaking. That is competency, and competency is valuable. But it is not the same thing as thriving.

The framework is not telling you to stop doing Enablement work. It is telling you that if Enablement is 60 percent of your week, you will burn out. Competency work should be 20 to 30 percent of your load, not the centre of it.

4. Check whether you are confusing introversion with a specific genius

Galvanising shows up in the results and you think "I am an introvert, this is wrong." Discernment shows up and you think "I speak up in meetings all the time, this cannot be right." The framework is not measuring your social energy. It is measuring the type of work that energises you.

Introverts can be Galvanisers. Extroverts can have Galvanising as a frustration. The confusion comes from assuming that rallying people requires being loud, socially confident, or extroverted. It does not. Some of the best Galvanisers I have worked with are quiet, thoughtful introverts who energise a room by asking the right question at the right moment, not by commanding attention.

What Galvanising actually measures: Do you get energy from rallying people around an idea, a decision, or a direction? That rallying can happen one-on-one. It can happen in writing. It can happen by creating the conditions in which other people feel permission to move.

The same applies to Wonder and Discernment. Wonder is not about being the loudest voice in the brainstorm. Discernment is not about being harsh or critical. Strip the social performance layer away and ask the question again. Does the work itself, done in conditions that suit you, give you energy or drain it?

5. Notice whether the disagreement is intellectual or emotional

Your brain says "this does not fit" but your body says something else. You read Invention in the results and immediately think of three reasons it is wrong, but when you imagine a week spent prototyping and building, your chest opens. That is not intellectual disagreement. That is fear.

Intellectual disagreement sounds like: "I have done this work in multiple contexts and it consistently drains me. The assessment has misread my responses."

Emotional disagreement sounds like: "I could never do that. I am not that kind of person. People like me do not get to spend time on Invention."

If your disagreement is intellectual, the next steps are diagnostic. Go back to the questions, check your answers, try the work in a different context. If your disagreement is emotional, the next steps are permission-based. The framework just named something you want but have never let yourself have.

The emotional resistance is often louder than the intellectual kind, and it disguises itself as logic. You will say "this does not fit my role" when what you mean is "I do not know how to ask for this." You will say "the team needs me elsewhere" when what you mean is "I am afraid of what happens if I admit I want something different."

Try this. Imagine you had full permission to restructure your role around your top two geniuses. No budget constraints, no political capital required, no guilt about letting people down. What would you change? If the answer comes fast and clear, your disagreement is not with the results. It is with the conditions that have kept you from living them.

INTERROGATING THE DATA

Once you have separated the type of disagreement you are having, the next step is to check the data. Not all disagreements are emotional or contextual. Some are legitimate misreads. The assessment is not infallible. It reflects the answers you gave in the mental and emotional state you were in when you took it.

6. Retake the assessment in a different mental state

You took the Working Genius assessment on a Friday afternoon after a terrible week. You took it in the middle of a restructure. You took it while questioning whether you even want to stay in your role. The answers you gave reflect the state you were in, not the person you are when you are operating from a stable baseline.

The assessment asks how you feel about types of work. If you are burnt out, every type of work feels draining. If you are in survival mode, the only work that feels tolerable is the work you can control. If you are grieving a loss or processing a betrayal, your answers will skew toward safety and away from risk.

Retake the assessment when you are rested, when the crisis has passed, when you have had two weeks away from the environment that was shaping your answers. Compare the two sets of results. If they are wildly different, the first set was measuring your state, not your wiring.

If the results stay consistent across multiple attempts in different conditions, trust them. If they shift depending on your emotional baseline, you are dealing with a data quality issue, not a framework issue.

7. Check whether you were answering for your role or for yourself

The questions ask what energises you. You answered what your role requires. This is the second most common source of misread results, and it is almost invisible while you are doing it.

You have been a deputy principal for six years. Enablement is 70 percent of the job. When the assessment asks if you enjoy supporting and organising, you answer yes, because you do it well and your team depends on it. What you do not notice is that the question was not asking whether you do it well. It was asking whether it fills your tank.

Answering for your role: "Do I do this work often and does my team value it?"

Answering for yourself: "Does this work energise me or drain me when I do it?"

Go back through the questions and ask yourself: was I answering as the person in this role, or as the person underneath the role? If you were answering as the role, your results are showing you what your job has trained you to value, not what you are wired for.

This is fixable. Retake the assessment and force yourself to answer as though your current role does not exist. Imagine you are between jobs, or imagine you are advising a friend, or imagine the role you would design if no one else's expectations mattered. Answer from that place.

8. Look for the questions you rushed through

You were 12 questions in and your brain was on autopilot. You clicked the middle option on three straight questions because you were thinking about the meeting starting in five minutes. The assessment does not know when you stopped paying attention. It just records the answers.

If your results feel off, go back and look at the questions tied to the genius you are questioning. Did you give them the attention they required, or were you moving fast to finish? The questions are short, but they are not simple. Each one is asking you to surface a pattern you might not have named before.

One rushed answer can skew an entire genius category. The algorithm is sensitive. It is looking for consistency across related questions, and if one answer is out of step with the others, it shifts the weighting.

Slow down. Retake the section that feels wrong. Give yourself time to sit with each question, to test it against real examples from the last six months, to notice what your body does when you imagine doing that work for a full day. The assessment is only as accurate as the attention you bring to it.

9. Cross-check your results against actual behaviour, not stated preferences

You say you love brainstorming, but when you look at your calendar, you avoid ideation sessions. You say you hate detail work, but you lose two hours every week building trackers no one asked for. Your stated preferences and your actual behaviour are not aligned, and the assessment picks up on that.

What you think energises you is often what you wish energised you. What actually energises you is what you do when you have discretionary time and no external pressure. The assessment is trying to measure the second thing. If your answers were based on the first thing, the results will feel off.

Try this diagnostic:

List the tasks you did last week when no one was watching and no one had asked you to do them

List the tasks you avoided or delegated even though you are good at them

List the tasks you finished and immediately wanted to do more of

List the tasks you finished and felt relieved to be done with

Map those four lists against your geniuses, competencies, and frustrations. If the patterns match, the assessment is accurate. If they do not, you answered based on preference, not on reality.

10. Recognise that some geniuses only show up outside of work

Your results say Wonder is a genius, but you cannot remember the last time you did Wonder work in your job. Before you dismiss the result, ask whether you do Wonder work everywhere else.

You spend Saturday mornings researching new approaches to a problem your school is facing, but you do it alone and you never bring it to the team. You disappear into articles and frameworks and possibilities for two hours, then you close the laptop and go back to your Enablement-heavy role on Monday. You have been doing Wonder work for years. You just have not had permission to do it inside your job.

The assessment does not know where you do the work. It only knows what energises you. If your geniuses are showing up in your hobbies, your side projects, your volunteer work, or the thinking you do in the margins, that is not a misread. That is a signal that your role is not using the best of you.

If you are doing your genius work outside of your paid role, you are either in the wrong role or your role needs to be redesigned. The framework is not wrong. Your job is.

TESTING THE RESULTS IN REAL CONDITIONS

Disagreement with results is often not about the assessment. It is about never having done the work in conditions where it could actually energise you. You cannot know whether Invention is a genius if you have only ever done Invention work under impossible deadlines with no support and no follow-through.

11. Try the work in a low-stakes environment

Your results say Galvanising, but every time you have rallied a group it has gone badly. Before you reject the result, ask what conditions you were operating in. Were you rallying a hostile room? Were you rallying people toward a decision you did not believe in? Were you doing it alone with no leadership support?

Galvanising under terrible conditions feels nothing like Galvanising under good ones. The same is true for every genius. Wonder in a culture that punishes questions is not Wonder. Discernment in a team that shoots the messenger is not Discernment. Enablement in a context where no one respects the systems you build is not Enablement. If you are not sure whether to trust your results, consider whether you can run a Working Genius workshop in a low-stakes setting to test the work in healthier conditions.

Try the work again, but this time in a setting where the conditions are right. Volunteer to facilitate a session for a group you trust. Offer to prototype something for a project you believe in. Spend a morning doing Tenacity work on a task where you control the outcome and no one is second-guessing you.

If the work energises you in the low-stakes environment but drains you in your role, the assessment is accurate. The problem is not your wiring. The problem is the environment that has been depleting it.

12. Track your energy across a two-week period

You think the assessment is wrong, but you have no data to back that up. You are operating on feeling, and feeling is shaped by recency bias, by the worst meeting of the week, by the task you are avoiding right now.

Spend two weeks tracking your energy at the end of each day. Note the tasks that filled your tank and the tasks that drained it. Be specific. Not "meetings drained me" but "the budget meeting drained me and the strategy session energised me." Not "admin work is terrible" but "building the new tracker energised me and processing emails drained me."

Task	Energy after	Likely genius
Designed new onboarding process	Energised	Invention
Reviewed budget spreadsheet	Drained	Tenacity (likely frustration)
Asked hard questions in exec meeting	Energised	Discernment
Followed up on three-month-old project	Neutral, some satisfaction	Tenacity (likely competency)

At the end of two weeks, map your energy data against your Working Genius results. If the patterns align, the assessment is accurate. If they do not, you have evidence for a conversation with a facilitator or a reason to retake the assessment with better self-awareness.

13. Ask three people who know you well what they see

You are too close to your own patterns to see them clearly. The people who work alongside you are not. They see what energises you before you do. They see what drains you even when you are pretending it does not.

Pick three people who have watched you work across different contexts. Not your manager, unless your manager is unusually perceptive and safe. Not someone who only sees you in one mode. Pick the colleague who has seen you in crisis and in flow, the peer who has worked with you on three different types of projects, the direct report who notices when your energy shifts.

Ask them these four questions:

What type of work do I do where I seem most alive?

What type of work do I avoid even when I am good at it?

What do I do that energises the people around me?

What do I do that I seem to resent, even if I never say it out loud?

Their answers will not perfectly map to the six Working Genius types, but the themes will. If all three people say you come alive when you are prototyping and building, Invention is probably accurate. If they all say you avoid the follow-through work even when it is your job, Tenacity is probably a frustration, not a competency.

Other people see your energy more clearly than you do. Use that. If their observations match your results, trust the results. If their observations contradict your results, you have new data to work with.

14. Give it six months before you decide

The framework is not designed to be understood in a single sitting. It is designed to be tested over time, in different projects, in different team configurations, under different kinds of pressure. Some geniuses only become visible when the conditions are right. Some frustrations only show up when you are forced to do that work for three months straight.

You read the results, disagreed, and dismissed them within 48 hours. That is not enough time. The assessment is naming patterns that might have been invisible to you for years. Give yourself space to notice whether the patterns actually show up.

Watch for these moments over the next six months:

A task that should drain you but does not

A meeting where you were energised and you cannot explain why

A project where you lost track of time

A day where you finished exhausted even though you barely did anything

When those moments happen, check them against your results. The energised moments should map to your geniuses. The exhausted moments should map to your frustrations. If they do, the assessment is right and your self-awareness is catching up. If they do not, you have evidence for a retest or a facilitated debrief.

The framework earns trust over time, not in the first reading. If you disagreed with your results six months ago but they have proven accurate in practice, that is the framework working. If you still disagree after six months of testing, that is worth investigating.

15. Test whether your disagreement is with the result or with what the result implies

Your results say Enablement is a competency, not a genius. You read that and feel defensive. But when you slow down and ask the real question, the defensiveness is not about the accuracy of the result. It is about what it means if the result is true.

If Enablement is only a competency, you have spent six years in the wrong role. If Galvanising is a frustration, you need to stop leading the kinds of meetings your organisation expects you to lead. If Wonder is a genius, you need to redesign your week, and that redesign will disappoint people who depend on you staying where you are.

The result itself might be accurate. The implications of the result might be terrifying. Your brain protects you by rejecting the result instead of reckoning with the implications.

Try this reframe. Assume for a moment that the result is completely accurate. What would have to change? Who would you disappoint? What would you have to admit to yourself about the last five years? If the answer to those questions feels unbearable, your disagreement is not with the data. It is with the cost of acting on the data.

That is a different problem, and it requires a different set of steps. The assessment is not wrong. You are just not ready to do what it is asking you to do. That is fine. But name it honestly. Do not dismiss the result when what you really mean is "I am not ready to act on this yet."

WORKING WITH WHAT THE RESULTS ACTUALLY SAY

Once you have tested the data, checked your mental state, tracked your energy, and separated intellectual disagreement from emotional resistance, you are left with one of two conclusions. Either the results are accurate and you need to learn how to work with them, or the results are genuinely off and you need a facilitated debrief or a retest. The next set of steps assumes the results are accurate, even if they still feel uncomfortable.

16. Reframe competency as valuable, not insulting

Competency is not a consolation prize. It is not the framework telling you that you are mediocre at something. Competency means you can do the work at a high level without it draining you completely, and you can step into it when the team needs it.

A team built entirely of people operating in their geniuses would collapse. You need people who can competently handle the work that does not energise them, because not every piece of work can be someone's genius. Competency is the bridge. It is what keeps the team functional when the workload does not align perfectly with everyone's wiring.

If Enablement is a competency for you, that means you can do it well enough that the team does not suffer, but you should not be doing it 60 percent of the time. It should be 20 to 30 percent of your load, handled in focused blocks, with recovery time built around it.

Competency work should be strategic, not constant. You do it when the situation requires it. You do it because you can, and because doing it frees someone else to operate in their genius. But you do not build your role around it, and you do not let it become the centre of your week.

The insult you are feeling is not coming from the framework. It is coming from the gap between how much time you have spent doing Enablement work and how little the framework says it should define you. That gap is real. The solution is not to reject the framework. The solution is to redesign your load.

17. Accept that frustration work will always feel terrible

Your results name Tenacity as a frustration. You have been doing Tenacity work for seven years, and you are good at it, and you hate it. The framework is telling you something you already knew but have been ignoring.

Frustration work does not get better with practice. You can build skill in it. You can become competent, even excellent. But it will never energise you. It will always feel like pushing a boulder uphill, and the moment you stop pushing, you will feel relief, not loss.

The mistake most leaders make is assuming that if they just get better at their frustration work, it will stop feeling like frustration. It will not. You have been excellent at Tenacity for years, and it still drains you. That is not a failure of effort or skill. That is your wiring telling you the truth.

If frustration work is more than 10 percent of your role, you will burn out. Not maybe. Not eventually. You will burn out, and the excellent work you have been doing in that area will stop being excellent because you will stop having the energy to sustain it.

The framework is not telling you to never do Tenacity work again. It is telling you that Tenacity work should be the smallest slice of your week, handled in short bursts, with someone else picking up the majority of it. If that is not currently true, your next step is not to get better at Tenacity. Your next step is to redesign your role or find a different one.

18. Stop trying to become a different person

You read the results and immediately start planning how to develop the geniuses you do not have. You see Invention in someone else and think "I need to get better at that." You see Galvanising as your frustration and sign up for a public speaking course. This is one of the most common Working Genius myths that undermines the framework.

The framework is not a development plan. It is a wiring recognition tool. You cannot develop your way into a different genius. You can build skill in areas outside your genius, and that skill will move you from frustration to competency. But it will never move you from competency to genius, because genius is not about skill. It is about energy.

Your energy does not change because you took a course. Introverts do not become extroverts because they practiced networking. People without Discernment do not suddenly develop it because they read a book on critical thinking. You can get better at the behaviours. You cannot rewire what refills your tank.

The question the framework is asking you is not "how do I become someone else?" The question is "how do I build a role and a team that lets me operate from my actual wiring, not the wiring I wish I had?"

If you do not have Invention and your role requires constant Invention work, you have three options. Reduce the Invention load. Partner with someone who has Invention as a genius. Leave the role. What you cannot do is develop Invention through effort and expect it to feel anything other than exhausting.

19. Use your geniuses to do your competency and frustration work

You still have to do some work outside your geniuses. The role requires it. The team depends on it. The framework is not giving you permission to abandon every task that drains you. But it is giving you a map for how to make those tasks less draining.

If Tenacity is a frustration but you have Wonder and Discernment as geniuses, you can use those geniuses to make the Tenacity work more bearable. You ask the Wonder question before you start. You use Discernment to decide which parts of the Tenacity work actually matter and which parts are performative. You bring your geniuses into the task, and the task becomes slightly less terrible.

This is not the same as doing work you love. It is damage control. It is making the necessary-but-draining work survivable so that you have energy left for the work that actually refills you.

Pairing strategies by genius:

If you have Wonder and need to do Tenacity work, start by wondering whether the task could be done differently

If you have Discernment and need to do Enablement work, use Discernment to eliminate the unnecessary systems before you build the necessary ones

If you have Galvanising and need to do Invention work, rally a small team to prototype with you instead of doing it alone

If you have Enablement and need to do Wonder work, structure the brainstorm so tightly that it feels like organised exploration instead of chaos

Your geniuses are tools. Use them everywhere, even in the work that is not genius work. They will not make frustration work energising, but they will make it less depleting.

20. Redesign your role in 90-day increments

You cannot change your entire job overnight. You can change 10 percent of it in the next 90 days. That 10 percent shift, repeated four times, is a different role.

Start with one task that drains you and one task that energises you. In the next 90 days, reduce the draining task by half and increase the energising task by 20 percent. That is the only goal. You are not redesigning the whole role. You are making one targeted shift.

What this looks like in practice: You currently spend eight hours a week on Tenacity work and two hours a week on Wonder work. Over the next 90 days, you delegate or eliminate four hours of Tenacity work and protect three hours of Wonder work. The net load has barely changed. The energy available to you has increased significantly.

Do that again in the next 90 days. And again in the 90 days after that. After a year, your role is unrecognisable, but no single shift felt impossible.

The mistake is trying to redesign everything at once. That requires political capital you do not have, approval you will not get, and clarity you have not earned yet. The 90-day increment is slow enough to be sustainable and fast enough to produce visible change before you lose momentum.

If you disagree with your results, this is the real test. Spend 90 days operating as though the results are accurate. Reduce your frustration work. Increase your genius work. Protect your energy. At the end of 90 days, check again. If you feel more alive, the results were right. If you feel the same or worse, you have data for a different conversation.

21. Name the guilt and let someone else carry the work

You know the results are accurate. You know Enablement drains you. You know someone else on the team has Enablement as a genius and would thrive doing the work you hate. But you feel guilty handing it off, because you have been doing it for years and people expect you to keep doing it.

That guilt is not virtue. It is the voice of a system that has been using you poorly, and you have internalized that poor use as responsibility. The guilt is what keeps you in the wrong role. It is what keeps the person with Enablement as a genius stuck doing work that does not use them well. It is what keeps the whole team operating below its potential.

Let the guilt be present, and act anyway. The person you are handing the work to is not being burdened. They are being given the chance to do work that energises them. You are not abandoning responsibility. You are redistributing work so that everyone operates closer to their wiring.

If handing off the work feels like betrayal, you have been over-functioning in that area for so long that your identity is tied to it. That is not the framework's problem. That is a leadership development issue, and it will not resolve by rejecting your results. It will resolve by building a team that does not need you to do everything.

22. Admit when the role is wrong, not the results

You tested the results. You tracked your energy. You tried the work in different conditions. The results are accurate. And the role you are in requires you to operate outside your geniuses 60 percent of the time.

The assessment is not the problem. The role is the problem. No amount of reframing or skill development will make a misaligned role sustainable. You can survive it for a year, maybe two. You cannot thrive in it, and you cannot sustain it for five.

If your geniuses are Wonder and Discernment and your role is 70 percent Enablement and Tenacity, you are in the wrong role. That is not a failure. That is information. The question is what you do with the information.

You have three options:

Redesign the role so that it aligns with your geniuses, which requires political capital and a leader who understands the framework

Move to a different role in the same organisation that better matches your wiring

Leave the organisation and find a role that was designed for someone with your genius pairing

None of those options are easy. All of them are better than spending the next five years pretending the results are wrong so that you do not have to admit the role is killing you.

The framework is not asking you to quit your job. It is asking you to stop lying to yourself about whether the job is using you well. What you do with that honesty is up to you.

23. Book a facilitated debrief if you are still stuck

You have done all of the above and you are still stuck. The results feel wrong, but you cannot articulate why. The energy tracking is inconsistent. The feedback from peers does not match your self-perception. You are caught between dismissing the framework and trusting it, and you do not have enough clarity to move forward. A qualified Working Genius facilitator can help you walk through the questions you rushed, surface the assumptions you brought to the assessment, and help you separate emotional resistance from genuine misalignment.

A debrief is not about convincing you the results are right. It is about giving you the space to test whether they are right, with someone in the room who has seen these patterns hundreds of times and can name what you are missing.

What a facilitated debrief should include:

A review of the questions where your answers were inconsistent or unclear

A conversation about the conditions under which you have done each type of work

Real examples from your last six months mapped against the six types

A comparison between what you think energises you and what your behaviour suggests actually energises you

Permission to name the emotional resistance without judgment

If the facilitator is worth hiring, they will not try to defend the results. They will help you interrogate them. If the results are accurate, the interrogation will make that clear. If the results are off, the facilitator will help you understand why and whether a retest makes sense.

Do not skip this step if you are genuinely stuck. The framework is too useful to dismiss because you could not make sense of it alone, and too important to trust blindly when it does not feel right.

USING DISAGREEMENT AS DATA

The final set of steps assumes something most people miss. Disagreement with your results is not always a problem to solve. Sometimes it is the most valuable data the assessment produces.

24. Recognise that disagreement often signals growth

Your results say Galvanising is a genius, but you have spent ten years avoiding leadership because a teacher told you in Year 8 that you were too quiet to lead. The result does not feel wrong because it is inaccurate. It feels wrong because it contradicts a story you have been telling yourself for two decades.

The assessment just named something you have been avoiding, not something you lack. The discomfort you feel is not the framework missing you. It is the framework showing you a version of yourself you have not let yourself become.

This happens most often with leaders who have been in the same role for five or more years. The role has shaped their identity. The results name a genius they had before the role, or a genius the role has never asked them to use, and the gap between who they were and who they have become is suddenly visible.

If your disagreement feels like grief, you are looking at growth. The result is showing you what you lost when you took the role, or what you have been suppressing to survive it, or what you gave up to meet someone else's expectations.

That grief is worth sitting with. It is showing you the cost of the choices you have made, and it is giving you permission to make different ones. The framework is not criticizing you. It is inviting you back to yourself.

25. Use the disagreement to start the conversation you have been avoiding

You have been questioning your role for two years, but you have not said it out loud. You have been wondering whether you are in the right organisation, but you have been too afraid to name it. You have been carrying a quiet resentment about the work you are doing, but you have not admitted it to anyone, including yourself.

The results arrive and they do not match your role. You disagree with them, not because they are wrong, but because agreeing with them would mean admitting that the last five years have been misaligned. That admission feels too costly, so you reject the results instead.

The disagreement is the doorway. It is the thing that gives you language for the conversation you have been avoiding. You can say to your manager, to your team, to your board, "I took the Working Genius assessment and the results do not match my role, and I think that is worth talking about."

That conversation might lead to a role redesign. It might lead to a job change. It might lead to a hard reckoning about whether you are in the right place. All of those outcomes are better than spending another two years pretending the misalignment does not exist.

The assessment is not the end of the process. It is the start of the process. If your disagreement with the results is strong enough that you cannot dismiss it and deep enough that you cannot resolve it alone, use it. Let it be the thing that finally names what has been true for years.

Your results do not have to feel comfortable to be accurate. They just have to be true enough that you cannot ignore them anymore.

The framework works best when you stop trying to make the results fit your current reality and start asking whether your current reality is using you well. That question is uncomfortable. It is also the only question worth asking.

Your next step is simple. Pick one of the 25 things above and try it. Track your energy for two weeks. Retake the assessment in a different state. Ask three people what they see. Reduce one frustration task by half. Book a debrief. Start the conversation you have been avoiding.

The disagreement you feel is not the end of the process. It is the entry point. The question is whether you are willing to walk through it.